Changelog:
Stone Soup 0.21 (20180105)
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Highlights
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* New species: Gnolls
* New god: Wu Jian Council
* New spell: Borgnjor's Vile Clutch
Branches, Environment
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* The rate at which unique Pan lord levels appear in Pandemonium is increased.
* Transporters now have a 'landing site' that indicates their destination.
* The Hellbinder and Cloud Mage Wizlabs have been revamped to give greater and
more varied challenges as well as improved loot.
Character
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* New species: Gnolls, with extremely high aptitudes for all skills, but
an inability to focus: Gnolls always train all skills equally, regardless
of whether they have the requisite items or spells.
* Ogres now have better aptitudes in shortblades, longblades, and axes.
Gods
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* New (temple) god: Wu Jian Council
- Grants free 'martial' attacks from certain movement actions:
* 0*: Moving toward an enemy triggers 'Lunge', which attacks the enemy and
does extra damage.
* 1*: Moving between tiles adjacent to a monster triggers 'Whirlwind',
which attacks all adjacent foes and 'pins' them, preventing one turn of
movement.
* 2*: Moving against solid obstacles triggers a two-turn Wall Jump, moving
two tiles in the opposite direction and attacking any adjacent enemies.
This ability can also be triggered via an (a)bility, and the movement-
based mode can be disabled using `wall_jump_move = false` in your rc
file for more careful play.
- 3*: Active 'Serpent's Lash' ability, granting two free movement actions,
of which any martial actions will never miss.
- 5*: Active 'Heavenly Storm' ability, creating opaque clouds and increasing
your martial prowess while you continue to use 'martial' attacks.
- Piety is gained through defeating foes.
* Gozag Potion Petition no longer offers haste/berserk potions for species
that can't haste/berserk.
* Zin blocks 100% of mutations at 6* piety. At that piety level, potions of
mutation now only remove mutations and don't cause piety loss.
* Zin no longer has a mutation removal one-time ability at 6* piety.
* Makhleb's Minor Destruction has slightly lowered range, and Makhleb's Major
Destruction has slightly increased range.
Interface
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* Players can now set training targets for skills.
- Press = on the skill screen, select a skill, and enter a skill level.
- Training of that skill is disabled when it reaches the specified level.
* Water species except for merfolk autoexplore/travel through shallow water.
* Diagonal shift-running now stops properly at doors.
* Draconian players now show their hat tiles in Tiles/WebTiles.
* New 'tc_forbidden' RC option to set color of squares forbidden by travel.
* New xp_by_level morgue table to track XP sources on a per-level basis.
* New -force-map objstat/mapstat option to always place a given map on each
level.
* New objstat fields for tracking monster numbers/XP from vaults.
* Many new tiles for artefact weapons and monsters.
Items
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* Wands of the same type merge charges upon pickup and wands have no cap on
charges.
* Wands identify charges upon pickup and are destroyed when their last charge
is used.
* Items in a doorways no longer prevent closing doors in most instances.
- Items get pushed out of the doorway when the player closes the door.
- Doors refuse to close only if the items would fall into deep water or lava.
* Potions of mutations remove fewer mutations on average and are a bit rarer.
* Fan of Gales now disperses clouds at the user's location.
* Un-equipping an item currently giving you invisibility now gives extra
contamination.
* Rods of lightning XP-recharge even when only partially used and only grant a
power bonus for shots over consecutive turns.
* Scarves are never made as artefacts.
* Wands of random effects include malmutate in the set of possible effects.
* Permanent food has been simplified.
- Rations are now the only type of permanent food, replacing bread and meat
rations, fruit, and royal jelly.
- Ration item generation and well as the herbivore and carnivore mutations
have been balanced to keep available nutrition the same as before.
- Fedhas abilities that formerly required a piece of fruit instead require
two rations.
* Removed:
- Wands of confusion and lightning.
- Scrolls of recharging.
- Mutagenic chunks.
Monsters
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* Monsters no longer spawn after level-generation in most places.
- This also eliminates the "super OOD" timer that could generate
exceptionally hard monsters after a long time on the level.
- The number of monsters created during level generation is increased
slightly to compensate.
- Pandemonium and Abyss are unaffected by this change.
* A fraction of the monsters generated with a level are created awake,
but never near stairs.
* Air elementals now have a Vortex ability, which creates a short-range,
short-duration tornado effect.
* Player ghosts have normal speed regardless of species, never have a chaos
ego on their melee attack, and no longer generate in portal branches.
* Pandemonium lords can no longer have the Shatter spell.
Spells
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* New spell: Borgnjor's Vile Clutch (L5 Necromancy/Earth); calls forth undead
hands from the earth over a smite-targeted area to constrict hostile monsters.
Appears in the Necromancer starting book, the book of Unlife, and the book of
Dreams.
* Shatter's damage has been simplified to use one of three dice values for
susceptibility, and can now slightly damage insubstantial monsters. Intrinsic
player/monster susceptibility takes precedence for damage over flight status.
* Lee's Rapid Deconstruction now gives each material type a fixed explosion
damage and size that doesn't increase when a wall is destroyed.
* Removed:
- Control Undead.
- Cigotuvi's Embrace.
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